Freedom or Virtue?

Pure traditionalism and absolute liberty alike fail the Constitution.

While one may grant religion and tradition credit for providing much of the energy necessary for a vibrant social life, it is also clear that both can generate such passion as to endanger social order. Rousseau was correct to this extent: freeing the individual from the cosmological consensus—from the ancient unity of church, state, and culture—has made nations difficult to rule. Failure to accept the resulting tension has caused a great deal of mischief and bloodshed over the centuries.

James Madison argued that there are only three possible solutions to the clash of interests. The first is to give government the power to suppress the divisions, “destroying the liberty that is essential” to allowing people to disagree. He argued that this is equivalent to destroying air to eliminate the danger of fire. Freedom causes disorder, but it is as essential to energetic social life as air is to natural life.

The second solution is to demand that all citizens have the same opinions—that all agree. This is the historical cosmological solution, the one advocated by Rousseau and the progressives. Madison dismissed this idea as “impractical” as long as people have different property, interests, and opinions and are allowed the freedom to express them.

The only solution to faction compatible with liberty is “controlling its effects” through the “proper structure” of a government in a constitution. Madison wrote:

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither internal nor external controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men the great difficulty lies in this: you must first allow the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

This view of human nature—as not unequivocally bad or good but as a balance between angelic and troublesome tendencies—was set deep within the Western tradition. The Founders saw differences, divisions, factions, and even conflict as innate to the tensions of social life, arising naturally even from minor disagreements. Concern about conflict underlay the whole constitutional structure the American Founders created. They sought to form governmental institutions that would balance ambition against ambition, interest and against, region against region, religion against religion, power against power.

Adoption of the Constitution did not change the historical fact that most peoples and cultures want agreement, with someone in charge. The desire to have someone in charge is overwhelming to the more progressive-minded, who have no tradition that would tolerate such ambiguity. Given world history, why would anyone agree to a Constitution that separates power and leaves no one in charge?

The inability to comprehend the idea of unity in diversity of power makes it impossible for progressives to see the world as the Founders did. At the heart of Western tradition is paradox, tension, ambiguity, subtlety, balance. There is a single Constitution but separate legislative, executive, and judicial branches; a national but also separate state and local governments; a single society but also churches and synagogues of many denominations and an infinite variety of private and public social entities that can be accommodated only by a vast social market allowing separate free choices. Once the subtlety of that synthesis cannot be comprehended, the Constitution as the Founders understood it cannot stand.

Progressivism was by no means alone in its desire to suppress the tension. As political theorist Frank Meyer argued, the desire to assert control can come from traditionalists or utopians of many stripes. Traditionalists may try to recreate a virtuous order supervised by a reconstituted cosmological state. Or there can be a rush to something entirely new, “to impose a limited human design of perfection upon a world by its nature imperfect” to use a government power to establish a utopian version of freedom or justice as the end of society. Either way, the goal is to force a unitary vision in place of an open-ended Constitution.

According to Meyer, pure traditionalism and pure libertarianism are “both distortions of the same fundamental tradition” that undergirds the Constitution. Both have attempted to suppress the constitutional tension.

Meyer was particularly critical of those traditionalists he called the New Conservatives—as opposed to the old conservatism of the Founders—who were inspired by professors Clinton Rossiter and Peter Viereck. In the name of traditionalism, they blamed Western individualism and freedom for weakening the ability of the state to inculcate virtue in modern times. Meyer especially targeted Rossiter’s demand to reject the “indecent anti-statism of laissez faire individualism,” which the professor claimed had undermined support for both traditional virtues and a compassionate welfare state.

These so-called New Conservatives in fact adopted the same solution that two early 20th century philosophers of modern progressivism had proposed. T.H. Green and Leonard Hobhouse argued that the necessary reform of classical liberalism was to make a distinction between positive and negative freedom. As Rossiter stated the required change in the New Conservatives’ worldview: “The conservative should give us a definition of liberty that is positive and all-embracing, not negative and narrow. In the new conservative dictionary, liberty will be defined with the help of words like opportunity, creativity, productivity, and security.”

Progressives offered different words to define “positive” liberty—terms like equality, welfare, compassion, and fairness. In either case, though, the result was the same: their ideology transformed liberty from a means to an end. The old meaning of liberty—as “freedom from” rather than “freedom to”—allowed individuals to set their own goals as long as they obeyed a few understandable general rules restricting one person’s liberty from infringing on another’s. Changing that meaning gives government a positive role of deciding what “freedom to” entails.

Most self-described libertarians would be shocked to be linked to Rossiter and Viereck, but they have attempted to resolve the tension in the same manner, by defining “freedom” in a positive way that forces their own desired ends. This was well illustrated in a 2005 debate under the topic “Conservatives and Libertarians: Can This Marriage Be Saved?”

America’s Future Foundation held a roundtable forum on the question of whether Meyer’s philosophical “marriage” of libertarian means and traditionalist ends should be dissolved. Nick Gillespie of the libertarian magazine Reason made the case for divorce. Gillespie criticized conservatives for too much government spending and regulation when Republicans were in power, especially under the Bushes. But the conservatives agreed with him on this. The real issue was that the conservatives supported what Gillepsie considered repressive institutions such as family and the church, whose “authoritarian” obligations undermined modern free lifestyles.

When asked what his position would be if freedom led to the free choice of authoritarian institutions like the family, community, and religion, Gillespie responded: “That is a good question, but history shows no such tendency. Freedom leads toward freedom.” (Not only did this avoid the question, but F.A. Hayek—whom Gillespie had quoted in support of his libertarian position—was clear that such institutions were what countered the state historically and allowed freedom to develop.)

Pure libertarianism defines positive freedom in a manner that requires a particular societal end: free lifestyles. This is the difficulty for the pure libertarian. He requires the power of the state, through a Supreme Court isolated from public opinion, to enforce his type of freedom. Unless the national courts intervene to overcome private, local, state, and national prejudices, “libertarian” free lifestyles would be frustrated by social pressures from traditional local social institutions.

Freedom does not necessarily lead to freedom when defined as “free lifestyles.” Freedom is unpredictable. Americans freely choose “authoritarian” institutions like family, church, and local community associations precisely to restrict their “free lifestyles.” The Constitution’s freedom is not an end to Americans but a means toward a safe, free, moral, devout, loving, and ordered life.

Progressivism, pure traditionalism, and ends libertarianism are united in rejecting the Constitution’s only end as being the balancing of power to leave state, local, and private sources to positively define the good ends of social life. Instead these three ideologies maintain that there is one right end for social life called positive freedom, which the state exists to promote. All three derive their positions from the philosophers of positive freedom. All three reject the truly authoritarian solution of eliminating freedom as the means, but each assumes that everyone will agree that its version of positive freedom is the one right end.

Although these three doctrines differ on goals—one favors scientific administration; another, traditional morality; the third, free lifestyles—they agree that people should pursue the same goal, their goal. That is, all three share the cosmological assumption that there should be a natural consensus on the proper end of society, an agreement that government officials and judges must enforce.

The progressive position is that this agreement can come about through democratic participation. But a widely reprinted analysis of the citizenship necessary for the modern welfare state calls this view into question. In the study—“Democracy in the 21st Century: Easing Political Cynicism With Civic Involvement”—former Harvard University president Derek Bok conceded that while some public participation was important in a democracy, popular involvement in referenda and local activism did not necessary lead to sound results as understood by those with the best understanding of the problem, the policy experts.

Right at the beginning, the major theorists of the progressive welfare state recognized the paradox. As Gunnar Myrdal noted, for the experts to improve social welfare they must be free to plan more comprehensively. But progressivism also taught that democracy required people to participate in the government to give it the necessary legitimacy. That very participation could create pressures against the best expert-designed programs. In the progressive view, power must be centralized in the hands of expert planners and popular participation must be limited to symbolic rather than active citizenship.

The Constitution’s Founders understood that national participation was necessarily symbolic for average citizens. That is why they devised a system where active citizenship was local and national responsibilities were limited. Tocqueville found that the early Constitution freely produced active citizen participation locally. This made the new nation work better than any other; greater participation at the levels closest to citizens even led to greater love of country.

The welfare state, by contrast, required a complacent, national citizenship where citizens deferred to government experts, as Bok and Myrdal frankly admitted. From the progressive viewpoint, it is the responsibility of those who understand to liberate the people from those parochial but free ways of home, community, church, and school. To a great degree, the progressive project has succeeded in both concentrating power and inculcating alternative lifestyles.

In the face of this, what can the traditional constitutionalist do? The pure traditionalist must accept the changes as the new tradition or absolutely oppose them. What about those who support the old constitutional citizenship based on a fusion of traditional morality and individual freedom? The only solution would seem to be loyalty to the Constitution and to local participation but a peaceful yet resolute nonconformity toward the accepted progressive values and the outcomes to which they lead.

When progressive intellectual E.J. Dionne Jr. interviewed Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in the 1980s, he could not comprehend how this seemingly intelligent man could insist on moral positions that conflicted with the views of a majority of Americans of his own tradition. Why could he not compromise with those people, who mostly took libertarian views on social issues, especially on sexual matters?

Ratzinger replied: “If it is true that a Christian faith taken seriously means nonconformity with a not inconsiderable number of contemporary social standards, then a more or less negative image is unavoidable.” Ratzinger concluded that in a confused world, the obligation of a moral tradition, Christian or otherwise, is to recover the capacity for nonconformity rather than seeking either elite or mass approval.

Ratzinger’s view was “conformed and united” within a broad Judeo-Christian tradition. Yet freedom was part of that tradition too. Once the cosmological veil is torn, the individual is freed from every restraining bond of clan, tribe, people, nation, and even family. As Jesus phrased it, “From now on there will be five in one family divided against one another, three against two and two against three.”

Released from every social group restriction, each individual must freely accept or reject the truth by him- or herself, guided by tradition or not. This individual free choice creates the tension that made Western civilization so dynamic, a dynamic that can be resolved only through something equally powerful—what Ratzinger identified as love.

This freedom does not require rebellion from or even disloyalty to the social order or the government, but it does require a certain peaceful nonconformity toward them. Love of nation still may be high, but it cannot be blind. There must be tolerance and even love for all other individuals, traditions, and religions, since traditional values cannot rightly be imposed on other individuals. Such a tolerance can even accept that relativism is dominant and that it must be confronted in free and rational debate rather than through power. Freedom is essential to human nature, Ratzinger argued, but it must be in the context of the tradition that identifies “constitutional democracy as being the only system realistically ensuring freedom.”

Progressive modernism requires a quiescent, conformist citizenry, but the resulting decline in energy and creativity weakens its welfare state socially, morally, and financially. The insurmountable obstacle is that concentrated power and uniformity cannot work in a complex world freed from cosmological unity and racked by tension. Freedom, tradition, and the Constitution require nonconformity toward power, and progressivism demands submission to it.

One or the other must yield.

Donald Devine is senior scholar at the Fund for American Studies and was Ronald Reagan’s director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during his first term.

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16 Responses to Freedom or Virtue?

Pure libertarianism defines positive freedom in a manner that requires a particular societal end: free lifestyles. This is the difficulty for the pure libertarian. He requires the power of the state, through a Supreme Court isolated from public opinion, to enforce his type of freedom. Unless the national courts intervene to overcome private, local, state, and national prejudices, “libertarian” free lifestyles would be frustrated by social pressures from traditional local social institutions.

Yes, and when libertarians start defending and even advocating the “lifestyles” promoted by the anti-cultural Left – perversion, drug use, mixing of all peoples everywhere and in all ways, even destruction of old too-traditional art and architecture and their replacement with the Left’s “art” – then they help the Left gain ground. Because ordinary people care about values, and will never care for a state that does nothing to promote values. If they are convinced to support leftist values, then they will accept the Left’s demand that government be used to force and brainwash all to live in accordance to their “values”.

The Left does this simply to win votes. They turn to the lazy, the drug users, the criminals, the perverts, the feminists, the immigrants, because it gives them voters and footsoldiers. The libertarians do it because they are ignorant of how societies are built and strengthened by conservative values. They have bought the Left’s propaganda about how harmless their anti-culture is, they just disagree with how much tax money shall be used to promote it.

Ironically, total non-government intervention would lead to conservatism. That is what conservatism is: an acknowledgment of the normal way of life. But the majority of people never want to live without government intervention.

Libertarians will never win in any country, anywhere. They will only help either the Left or the Right. And since they have no philosophical basis for supporting conservative values, they choose the path of least resistance and ally with the leftist media when it comes to values, thereby helping the Left.

Those who would now bring up that Ron Paul is opposing the Left’s power, while not espousing its values, forget that he is one person, while the vast majority of libertarians – or liberals, as they are called in European countries – have never belonged to his movement, and never will. Liberals (libertarians) in Europe, called right-wingers, strongly condemn Ron Paul and his followers as religious, gun-obsessed fanatics, and consider him evil for not wanting government tax money and regulations to favor homosexuals, women, immigrants, etc. That is the inevitable road of liberalism/libertarianism.

I’ve been a libertarian for over 40 years. In the past,Libertarians were always marginalized or ignored. Today,libertarian values and ideas are starting to enter the American main stream. So what happens? Critics of libertarian ideas lump those ideas in with every fringe idea that has been promoted over the last 100 years never bothering to check out what libertarian values and philosophies are really all about. These critics,many of them trolls,will go onto web sites such as TAC to pigeonhole and stereotype a political movement and to make them look unacceptable to main stream America. Its an old tactic often used by Cultural Marxists to undermine opposing political views. Never bother to rationally debate ideas or the status quo but discredit the opposition by setting up a political target and then throwing mud at the invented target. Of course like any political movement there are kooks that hang onto that movement’s coattails. But to stereotype a whole political movement based on 1 or 2 percent of that movement and ignore the ideas of the other 98 percent is not only unfair but is disingenuous and quite frankly a smear tactic. What is best,for those interested in what the libertarian movement is all about,is to Google THE LIBERTARIAN PARTY PLATFORM. This platform will tell you in broad terms what the libertarian political,social and economic philosophy and policies are all about. Agreement and or criticisms are always welcomed in any rational debate. But lets keep the debate rational and objective. It is only fair.

This article is cherry picking a few libertarians and then broad-brushing the rest of them. The vast majority of libertarians do not want government involved in setting family or religious traditions. They believe rights can only be taken away by government, not given, and that government is the greatest danger to people’s rights.

@ carpenter – Most libertarians are social conservatives and many are religious in their personal lives, but do not believe its any business of government, and that those things should not enter into politics. To say the libertarians are a bunch of dope smoking sick perverts, Nick Gillespe not withstanding, is absurd. I don’t believe you’ve met many libertarians.

I must take issue with this: “The second solution is to demand that all citizens have the same opinions—that all agree. This is the historical cosmological solution, the one advocated by Rousseau and the progressives.”

Aside from the article misrepresenting much of what progressivism is – which is an heuristic about the status quo rather than a cloak for Communism (I simplify) – it’s not supported by text. By the standards of his day, JS Mill was a progressive. Note this chapter Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion from his essay On Liberty.

Ronald Reagan,
“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals–if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.

Now, I can’t say that I will agree with all the things that the present group who call themselves Libertarians in the sense of a party say, because I think that like in any political movement there are shades, and there are libertarians who are almost over at the point of wanting no government at all or anarchy. I believe there are legitimate government functions. There is a legitimate need in an orderly society for some government to maintain freedom or we will have tyranny by individuals. The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood. We have government to insure that we don’t each one of us have to carry a club to defend ourselves. But again, I stand on my statement that I think that libertarianism and conservatism are traveling the same path.”

“The desire to have someone in charge is overwhelming to the more progressive-minded, who have no tradition that would tolerate such ambiguity.”
This––as is sadly typical on TAC––is a gross misrepresentation of progressivism/leftism. If progressives loved worshipping a master so much, why would they hate having bosses? Why did they hate kings? In Mao’s China, there were very serious factional divisions; in Stalin’s Russia, there were strong right- and left-wing ‘deviations.’ It is baseless and it discredits your entire point to say that all progressives are authoritarians.

I should add: I think anti-federalism would be a much more appealing ideology if the historical record on it weren’t so discouraging: states’ rights tend NOT to lead to more decentralized government and tend to lead to the centralized authority of the most powerful interest groups––read: business groups––in individual states. This was the case with the Civil War: the slave states were not controlled by the white majority––most of whom were not slave-owners but small farmers and many of whom considered the rebellion “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight,” the exploitation of the poor farmers for the ends of the rich plantation-owners––and today, the states are even more dominated by big-business than the federal government is. Anti-federal conservatives need to stop saying they believe in small government when the governments they are supporting––states––are just as repressive and, historically, often more repressive––Jim Crow? segregation?––than the federal government, which by itself is plenty repressive.

Every time I read a conservative or libertarian description of progressives or liberals, I wonder who they’re writing about. I certainly don’t recognize the written characteristics in any progressive or liberal I know.

These so-called New Conservatives in fact adopted the same solution that two early 20th century philosophers of modern progressivism had proposed. T.H. Green and Leonard Hobhouse argued that the necessary reform of classical liberalism was to make a distinction between positive and negative freedom.

Well, you do have a quote from Rossiter that you can use to support that. My understanding of Viereck, though, is that for him the New Deal and its values (whatever you want to understand by that) had become part of the good status quo that conservatives should support and defend. Whether he was right or wrong I don’t see any great longing after more positive freedom in him. Maybe it was there implicitly in his thinking, but I really doubt he would have phrased it that way.

It looks like you are associating everyone who ever found things the government does useful or valuable with a progressive concept of “positive freedom.” That includes just about everyone going back to the Founding Fathers.

For other people who used the phrase “positive freedom” or “positive liberty” there was a clear difference between those who supported “negative freedom” and those who demanded “positive freedom.” Your usage tends to blur or muddy the distinction by making “positive freedom” something almost everybody makes use of when they drive on a public road or buy stamps at the post office. That may be a welcome change, but it makes it harder to use the terms polemically.

Most self-described libertarians would be shocked to be linked to Rossiter and Viereck …

As well they might. Libertarianism is the philosophy of negative freedom par excellence. People may make use of their liberty to achieve goals which may or may not be praiseworthy, but to advocate getting government out of the way and letting individuals do what they will is to promote the cause of negative liberty, rather than positive.

You are taking one comment by Nick Gillespie, an urban media hipster who’s hardly representative of people who call themselves libertarians, as typical of the whole movement. My experience has been that libertarians, even those who support gay marriage, aren’t looking to government to create some kind of greater positive freedom for themselves or others.

They don’t seek assistance to live “free” lifestyles. They just live as they think right and want to get government out of their way. And, no, most of them aren’t prejudiced against “family, religion, and community” (state and nation may be another matter, though).

Every time I read a conservative or libertarian description of progressives or liberals, I wonder who they’re writing about. I certainly don’t recognize the written characteristics in any progressive or liberal I know.

Sure, but that happens the other way around as well. Liberal or progressive descriptions of conservatives don’t always reflect how conservatives see themselves.

What you hear reflects the point at which people think you took the wrong path. So the Progressive Era, the New Deal or the 1960s is made more important to liberals or progressives than it actually may be to you. Or it reflects the time when people stopped listening to the other side’s arguments.

Right now there seems to be a set of talking points circulating to describe conservatives as “nihilist” or “anarchist” or “secessionist.” That doesn’t really reflect the reality I see.